CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am trying to import data, and I am getting an error on every record telling me "Missing required fields: First Name and Last Name OR Email Address" -- My understanding (based on reading previous threads in this forum) is that I only need an email field OR the first/last name. Well, I'm ONLY importing email addresses, so I definitely have an email address for every record -- it's the ONLY thing in each record.

So, what am I doing wrong? Thanks!

Thanks Kirin,

I can't really attach a data file with any of our data in it because it is all personal data -- it is just a list of email addresses in CSV format. That's it. Nothing else. 1890 rows of email addresses put together via Excel and saved as csv.

So, at this point, I have gotten past that error. Originally the file was 3 columns of email addresses, with the 2nd and 3rd column containing secondary email addresses for the person represented by each row. Obviously, not many people had a second email address, and even fewer had a third. I deleted the 2nd and 3rd columns, and it looked like CiviCRM was going to import the file...

HOWEVER, no such luck...

I got as far as the little popup status window that shows the progress of the import. The import goes until the last 10 records, then I get nothing but a white screen.

I'm sure 1890 rows is not too much data (it's wayyyyy under the file size limit), but I'm going to try splitting the file in half and see what happens. I'll post the results here...

If you have any other suggestions, let me know. Maybe you've seen this problem before. I searched and found nothing.

I split the list in half, and it told me that every row had an error and was not imported, and it told me that every row had been imported. But every line did import. Go figure.

I think I can get the rest of my data imported by doing this in small files, but I'll install the patch in the morning anyway to see if it helps. I'll let you know one way or the other.

I just tried importing my next set of data just to see if maybe, just maybe, it was this set of data -- nope... whatever I try to import, it takes in 15 rows and ignores everything else as if it does not exist.

Problem solved, but in case anyone else has this problem, I wanted to come back and explain how I solved the issues that I was having.

First, I'll answer Kiran's questions. I was not getting any error message. The system was telling me that it was successfully importing 15 rows. It was as if I only had 15 rows of data, and the system was importing all of them just fine. I tried to import about half a dozen files, all split off from the same data set, to no avail -- same problem on each.

I read on this forum that some people had this problem because Excel's encoding is bad. Some people on this forum had been able to get the data imported by re-saving in Open Office, and I thought to myself... any plain text editor will do.  So, I resaved them as .txt in a couple of different plain text editors, but that didn't do any good. On a whim, not thinking it would work (after all, I already resaved as plain text), I downloaded Open Office and tried (as a last resort) saving in that format. Wah-lah, that data downloaded just fine.

So, bottom line, anyone who's having this 15 rows issue -- the Open Office solution really does work. Try it even if you've already saved in the appropriate format via a text editor (even if you save as txt then back to csv again, Open Office is still your solution!).

Regarding the patch... since I have the data in the system, and it is working, I didn't want to delete it and try again. But I am going to have more data to import again soon, so I will definitely be trying out that patch.

Thanks Kiran!